[SOUND] Welcome to user experience design. Interaction design is a cycle. In this lesson you will get an overview of the material to be covered and the requirements gathering module. We've discussed that as designers, we provide the best user experience when we acknowledge that users use interfaces to accomplish tasks. The first step of the design process is to understand how users are completing the task now. However, we might find ourselves in the following situation. Your new client would like to venture into a new area, health and wellness. Specifically, they want a recommender system to encourage healthy eating choices. The client would like for you to build a ubiquitous computing system. [SOUND] You tell them that you can't just start brainstorming. You need to follow the user design cycle. The goal of requirement gathering is to understand the problem space. We understand the problem space by learning who the users are, when, where, why, and how they currently accomplish the task in question. What users perceive are problems with their current practices. And user's wish list for improving how they currently accomplish their task. The main pitfall of requirement gathering is that designers start designing alternatives when they do not completely understand the task, the user, or how the user currently accomplishes a task. In other words, they get ahead of themselves. They start designing without user data. I have told you that one of the mantras for this class is that design is a systematic and data driven process. As you know my preference for the word data comes from my background in social science. We can just as easily say that design should be evidence based. Designers have techniques that allow us to discover what the user is doing now and we have other techniques that allow us to present and summarize our results. In this module we will review four discovery techniques. Naturalistic observation, survey, focus group and interview. We also have techniques for representing what we discover about the user. This include user characteristics tables and personas. There are also techniques to represent findings about the tasks. These include scenarios, essential use case scenarios, hierarchical task analysis and current UI critique. Based on the requirements gathering data we will also be able to develop usability principles that will help us evaluate our novel interface. Data from the requirements gathering phase also allows designers to drive novel interface characteristics. This is done via deduction. In this lesson, we reviewed requirement gathering techniques. I look forward to seeing you in our next lesson where we will go over each technique in detail.